The MATLAB® programming environment (hereinafter MATLAB) is a product of The MathWorks, Inc. of Natick, Mass., which provides engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and educators across a diverse range of industries with an environment for technical computing applications. MATLAB® is an intuitive high performance language and technical computing environment that provides mathematical and graphical tools for mathematical computation, data analysis, visualization and algorithm development. MATLAB® integrates numerical analysis, matrix computation, signal processing, and graphics in an easy-to-use environment where problems and solutions are expressed in familiar mathematical notation. MATLAB® is used to solve complex engineering and scientific problems by developing mathematical models that simulate the problem. A model is prototyped, tested and analyzed by running the model under multiple boundary conditions, data parameters, or just a number of initial guesses. In MATLAB®, one can easily modify the model, plot a new variable or reformulate the problem in a rapid interactive fashion that is typically not feasible in a non-interpreted programming language, such as Fortran or C.
As a desktop application, MATLAB® allows scientists and engineers to interactively perform complex analysis and modeling in their familiar workstation environment. However, a single workstation can be limiting to the size of the problem that can be solved, because of the relationship of the computing power of the workstation to the computing power necessary to execute computing intensive iterative processing of complex problems in a reasonable time. For example, a simulation of a large complex aircraft model may take a reasonable time to run with a single computation with a specified set of parameters. However, the analysis of the problem may also require the model be computed multiple times with a different set of parameters, e.g., at one-hundred different altitude levels and fifty different aircraft weights, to understand the behavior of the model under varied conditions. This would require five-thousand computations to analyze the problem as desired, and the single computer would take an unreasonable or undesirable amount of time to perform these simulations. In this case, the single computer would be allocated full-time to performing the computation while many computing resources on the network may be idle. Additionally, the benefit of the interactive features of the software is reduced as the computation time increases.
Hence, distributed computing is very useful for distributing tasks to multiple computing resources, especially for a computationally intensive problem. However, most technical computing software was not initially designed for distributed computing. Now, with the availability and possibility of distributed computing, software developers face the problem of how to configure the distributed computing environment and transform functions and codes initially designed for a desktop application to work in the distributed computing environment. Furthermore, the complexity of this transformation increases as software developers want to allow users to setup their own distributed computing environment, but at the same time minimize the amount of changes to the existing function signatures and minimize the amount of information that users need to enter about their environment.